that’s what she said – choice theory edition

Self-Concept and Birth Motherhood
I love the questions that are being raised in this post. She’s framing the question around birthmothers, but I think it is relatable to anyone who has faced major life-changing events. How do we define ourselves based on the tragedies or regrets in our life, and is anger a useful tool for creating our self-concept? The comments are thought-provoking, too.

The Case Against Breastfeeding
I thought this article did a great job of exploring the difficulty of breastfeeding, and the impossibility of maintaining an egalitarian marriage when one person is the exclusive food source. I think theses issues should be talked about more. I am pro-breastfeeding, but like this author I am a bit dismayed by the shame involved for women who don’t/can’t. An excerpt:

“In Betty Friedan’s day, feminists felt shackled to domesticity by the unreasonably high bar for housework, the endless dusting and shopping and pushing the Hoover around—a vacuum cleaner being the obligatory prop for the “happy housewife heroine,” as Friedan sardonically called her. When I looked at the picture on the cover of Sears’s Breastfeeding Book—a lady lying down, gently smiling at her baby and still in her robe, although the sun is well up—the scales fell from my eyes: it was not the vacuum that was keeping me and my 21st-century sisters down, but another sucking sound.“

I’m not saying that we should stop discussing and debating and dithering over our parenting choices. I’m just saying that we should remind ourselves, always, that these choices are a luxury, that the very fact that they exist as choices is a marker of our privilege, and that they no more reflect what is truly right and what is truly wrong and what is truly good and what is truly bad than do any of our other choices – the choice between whether to study literature or engineering in college, say, or the choice between whether to eat organic or to just go for those tinned peaches, because it’s easier and you love the syrup – and that they are just matters of us deciding how we want to live. Because most of us have those choices – perhaps in greater and lesser degrees, sure, but we do. We do. Other people, in other places, don’t.

I Didn’t Know You Worked
Jillian Lauren, author of the book Some Girls, talks about her difficulty justifying writing as a “real job” and the double standard for women and working. An excerpt:

It’s my experience that not just as women but specifically as mothers, we have to not only fight harder for the solitude to create, but we feel guiltier about doing so than our male counterparts. I don’t think this guilt is ultimately serving either me or [my child].